Search engine optimization (SEO) is a valuable digital marketing strategy that attracts your target customers to you and boosts the organic ranking of your business website in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
SEO is the deal if you want your business website to rank organically; it is valuable you have an ongoing SEO campaign.
Businesses with an SEO campaign rank higher and become visible in the search engine in the search engine results pages.
Ranking higher in the search engine result pages will increase your website traffic, boost the awareness of your brand, and earn you more revenue.
With these kinds of benefits you can derive from your SEO campaign, you can now see the reason SEO is one of the budget-friendly and most effective digital marketing strategies we have today
Meanwhile, as a business owner, it will interest you to know how long it will take you to see positive results from your SEO campaign.
Grab a cup of coffee and read along as I want to talk about the typical SEO timeline, the things that are involved in an SEO campaign, and how long you can wait to see your SEO campaign results.
Are SEO Results Immediate?
Today we live in a world where everybody wants immediate results, we don’t like a long-term plan that can deliver results after some time.
This also applies to an SEO campaign.
Business owners that invest in SEO know the great results they can get after the waited days.
That is the reason why so many businesses that included SEO in their marketing strategy ask “How long it takes for SEO to deliver results?”.
Unlike the pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement that delivers immediate results, an SEO campaign takes some months before you can start seeing results.
It means that your website will not jump to the first position of search engine results pages (SERPs) the day you implement your SEO strategy.
You will not experience an increase in your website traffic and your sales will not increase in the first month of your SEO campaign implementation.
Meanwhile, you can have patience and wait till after 6 months before you start seeing results.
SEO results are beyond rankings too, you must rank for keywords that will attract leads and increase sales from your target customers.
Why Does SEO Take so Long to Work?
Since SEO strategies are broken down into different categories, it will be difficult to see an immediate result.
It takes the search engine time to read this relevant information;
All of the above-listed information and more determines how your business website will rank in SERPs.
Google must also be able to crawl and index your website before you can potentially rank high.
Google has its users in mind, so it always wants to provide its users with the most relevant information that answers their queries and also gives them an excellent user experience.
Because of this, Google will only display results that contain the most useful information that answers users search queries.
The more your website contains useful information that users love, the higher your website will rank on the Google search engine.
How Long Does it Take SEO Before it Works?
Knowing all of these things, you should understand better why it takes SEO a little longer to bring results than other digital marketing strategies.
But the great question is, what is the exact time it will take for your SEO campaign to start generating organic traffic, leads, and sales to you?
The truth is that it is difficult to say that this is the time it will take before your SEO campaign starts bringing results.
How long it will take before it brings results depends on some factors like:
Considering the various factors that are involved, it normally takes 4-6 months to start seeing organic website traffic increase from your SEO campaign.
This frustrates many business owners since they don’t really understand how a marketing campaign can take that much time before it will start to bring results
However you might see it as a business owner, SEO is a complex digital marketing strategy with many sub-strategies that allow it to become extremely effective as time goes by.
A typical SEO timeline: What are the things that happen in months 1-6 of your SEO campaign?
For you to understand the time involved when running an SEO campaign, it will be much easier if you look at it month by month through an SEO timeline.
First (1st) Month
You are through with your marketing research and the SEO professional that will work for you, he/she offers all the SEO strategies that you have been looking for and you are curious about when to start your SEO campaign.
Listed below are some of the things that your hired SEO professional will work on in the first month of your campaign.
Website Audit
The moment you become a client, your hired SEO professional will have to analyze your website.
He will have to take a look at the structure of your website, the content that is on it, the technical issues, and the overall user experience of your website.
This will help to see what your website contains so that he can develop an area of opportunity and create a competitive SEO strategy for high results.
Research
He will start by researching everything about your business to the last details of it.
At this stage, you will also have to provide him with your business's necessary information, this is necessary because every business is different and have its unique value proposition.
Your hired SEO professional will also do research about your business industry, how competitive your industry is.
The specific niche you focus on, your competitors and how they rank on the search engine, and the most important keywords in your industry that you rank for.
Keyword Planning
If you have been doing a lot of research about marketing you will have probably heard the saying that “Content is king” and as such, it should be taken seriously.
Content is what you put on your website that let you rank in the google search engines. Without content, your website will be dead.
Although before your website content can rank you in the google search engine, you will have to create pages on your website that target the relevant keywords that your target customers search for in the google search engine.
For this reason, doing keyword research and planning how to execute it is an important SEO process.
SEO tool like SEMRush can help you with your keyword and competitor research.
Second (2nd) Month
You need to also remember that, all the SEO processes that are done in the first month most times don’t take up to a month.
Depending on the current quality of your business website, your hired SEO professional might likely begin the SEO process that usually takes place within the second month in the first month.
There are typically few SEO strategies that take place within the second month of your SEO campaign.
Website Modifications
The second month is the month your hired SEO professional will begin the technical SEO process.
What this translates to is that your hired SEO professional will enter the back end of your website and start to make the appropriate changes that will ensure your website rank higher in the google search engine results pages.
The changes that will occur are solely based on the results of your website audit.
For example, if the images on your website have alt tags, then there is no need to fix them, but if meta descriptions are absent on some of your web pages then they must be updated.
If your business website is an old website, then there is a necessity that it must be redesigned to match up with the new SEO updates.
This SEO redesign alone could take some weeks, depending on how sophisticated you want the website.
Ensure Responsive Design
The design responsiveness of your website is a big SEO ranking factor that can improve the organic traffic of your website.
What responsive design means is that no matter the device your target customers use to view your website, they have an excellent experience.
If your business website is not responsive, the desktop view will be different from a mobile or tablet view.
The website will be messed up, it will probably look like a spam website and it will also be difficult for your target customers to navigate through it.
At this stage in your SEO campaign process, your hired SEO professional will need to make sure that website is mobile responsive because it is not responsive it will surely affect your ranking on the google search engine.
Third (3rd) Month
The third month is the game changer. If you don’t forget I said earlier that content is king. The third month is where that begins.
Keyword selection
Before your website content can be created and implemented, your hired SEO professional will have to look at the long lists of your business target customers' keyword queries he pulled during the first month of the SEO process.
He/she will then narrow the keywords down to the necessary ones that will be targeted with content.
Different keywords work perfectly fine for different kinds of content.
For example, we have generic keywords queries and long-tail keywords queries.
Generic keywords are normally not more than two words, and they are used to describe a broad topic. Example of generic keywords terms includes “shoes”, “cloth”, “gadget,” or “car.”
Generic keywords often have a high search volume in the search engine and they are targeted by lots of businesses. This makes it difficult to rank for them.
Long-tail keywords on the other hand are more targeted keyword that contains more than three words.
According to your industry, long-tail keywords target an ultra-specific need of your target customers.
They comprises of keyword phrases like “Which phone has the best battery in the world” or “Nike shoes that can make me run faster.”
Each of these long-tail keywords caters to the specific need of your target customers.
Although long-tail keywords usually have a low search volume in the search engine, they usually attract potential customers and generate more qualified leads for your website.
To let your SEO campaign deliver quality results, you need the combination of both high search volume and low search volume keywords.
You are quite seeing that a lot of effort has been put into the selection of your business-related keywords before your content can be written.
This is the reason why content creation takes more time, depending on the need of your website and target customers.
Content Creation
Content creation is one of the most important parts of your business SEO campaign that should not be neglected.
Similar to your business keywords, we have different kinds of content too.
Within this third month of your SEO campaign, your hired SEO professional will pair each of your listed keywords with a specific kind of content that delivers the best result for each topic.
There are many types of content, like long-form content, short-form content, and general product/service-related content.
At this stage, your hired SEO professional will determine the kind of content that is needed on your website and create the right plan for your website.
Long-form content is content that normally contains more than 2000 words count, and it is extremely important and the most useful for SEO purposes.
Google search engine also ranks long-form content higher in the search engine and they are more likely to also have more shares on social media and acquire more backlinks.
Writing 2000 words long-form SEO content is not as simple as writing just a 2000 words article and posting it.
When writing SEO content, you need to have your target customers in mind, your content needs to satisfy their want.
Your website must contain content that satisfies your target customers' search intent before you can rank high on the google search engine.
Writing blog content is also beneficial for SEO. Because of its constant updating, the search engine also ranks blog posts more than web copy so as to provide the best answer to internet users.
They are also easily shared on digital social media channels.
Fourth (4th) Month
In the fourth month of your SEO campaign process, you will gradually begin to see results.
This is the month your website organic traffic will increase and your website will also improve in ranking in the SERPs.
Seeing traffic doesn’t mean your SEO job is over, content optimization and implementation will continue on your website.
Every technical issue that also comes along the line will be fixed, and your hired SEO professional will have to make that your website function at 100%.
During this month, to keep your SEO campaign momentum moving, the continuous addition of content and the technical aspects of your SEO campaign like Link building will also be done.
Gaining authoritative links is important for your website's ranking in Google search engine results pages (SERPs) because it is like a vote of confidence that shows the google search engine that other high-authority websites trust your website enough to link to it.
Your hired SEO professional will have to reach out to other companies in your industry so that they can link to your business website and improve your ranking in the google search engine.
Fifth (5th) Month
By the fifth month of your SEO campaign, you will start seeing real results.
You will start getting organic traffic from your target customers, and you will likely get some extra sales too.
This is a good indication that your SEO campaign is effective.
Looping in Social Media
If you are yet to link your social media profiles to your website, then you need to do it.
You need to have social media accounts that will embrace your brand, and they can also be used by your website visitors to share your valuable blog posts for more reach.
Analyzing Current Results
Another thing your hired SEO professional will do is to report his current SEO situation to you.
He/she will have to keep track of your SEO campaign throughout the 6 months process, but you should have started seeing your campaign result.
He/she will make use of website analytics like Google Analytics to measure your SEO campaign and notify you about how well it is performing.
Sixth (6th) Month
On the 6th Month, you shouldn’t be discouraged if you are yet to see any results from your SEO campaign.
Some SEO campaigns take more than 6 months to start generating results depending on the business industry, competitors, and other SEO factors that might determine your ranking factors.
However, if your website has started generating results by this time, congratulations! But you shouldn’t stop your SEO campaign immediately after you start getting results.
You should try to continue your campaign so that you will earn your customer's trust and get tons of website traffic and increase in revenue through google search engine from users that are already looking for your business on the web.